Mojo - July 2006

Since the FDA agreed to review Plan B for over-the-counter (OTC) sale in June 2003, the agency--hostage to the conservative-religious political agenda--has gone out of its way to avoid issuing a decision. But today AP reports:

The government is considering allowing over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill to women 18 and older. The surprise move Monday that revives efforts to widen access to the emergency contraceptive almost a year after it was thought doomed.

A new New York Times/CBS poll shows that the partisan divide over the war is growing, and is already far greater than it was over the height of America's conflict over the Vietnam War. According to the Times:

Three-fourths of the Republicans, for example, said the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, while just 24 percent of the Democrats did. Independents split down the middle.

It is tempting to take self-righteous satisfaction in such trends, and each party/side is formulating a way to exploit what a pollster quoted by the Times cites as a "growing chasm" to their own advantage. But if one can step back a moment from 2006/2008 tactics, this is not good news.

For one thing, ignorance of the facts still abounds. As Brad blogged earlier this week, a Harris poll finds:

Half of Americans [STILL!!] now say Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the United States invaded the country in 2003  up from 36 percent last year....In addition, 64 percent say Saddam had "strong links" with al Qaeda...Fifty-five percent said that "history will give the U.S. credit for bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq."....American confidence in the Iraqis has improved: 37 percent said Iraq would succeed in creating a stable democracy, up five points since November.

Meanwhile, as the Times reports,

An analysis by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that the difference in the way Democrats and Republicans viewed the Vietnam War  specifically, whether sending American troops was a mistake  never exceeded 18 percentage points between 1966 and 1973. In the most recent Times/CBS poll on Iraq, the partisan gap on a similar question was 50 percentage points.

Thankfully, as of yet, this divide has not resulted in the vilification of the kids sent off to fight this war. But my worry is that on this issue, as on so many others confronting us these days, the country, and the families that compose this country, will be unable to do anything other than malign each other. That may fit into the strategies of politicians on either side of the Iraq War debate, but will it help us figure out a solution?

"The State Department agency in charge of $1.4 billion in reconstruction money in Iraq used an accounting shell game to hide ballooning cost overruns on its projects there and knowingly withheld information on schedule delays from Congress.

(For those not familiar with the term, "taking out the trash," means quietly dumping truly embarrassing news on Friday evening, because, to quote the "West Wing" episode that discusses the phenomena, on Saturday, "no one reads the paper.")

Indeed, to say these findings were released at all is an overstatement, as they were buried in an audit of the Basra hospital project touted by Laura Bush and Condi Rice. The auditwhich was conducted by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent office that reports to Congress and the Pentagonfound that the cost of hospital project, which was contracted out to San Francisco-based multinational Bechtel for $50 million, could, as the Times reports, "rise as high as $169.5 million, even after accounting for at least $30 million pledged for medical equipment by a charitable organization." The United States Agency for International Development, or AID, intentionally hid these cost overruns (as well as those for other projects) from Congress, by reclassifying them as overhead, or "indirect costs." An AID contracting officer cited in the audit notes that the agency "did not report these costs so it could stay within the $50 million authorization."

But leaving aside all that, the really ominous part of the auditors' findings were spelled out by the Washington Post:

· There is no overall plan for transferring U.S.-initiated reconstruction projects to Iraqi government control and no schedule for when they will be completed.

· A planned first-responder network -- intended to allow Iraqis to call for help in the event of emergency -- is ineffective because of communications problems that prevent most dispatch centers from receiving calls from civilians. By the end of the year, more than $218 million will have been spent on the program.

· The United States has devoted little time or money to a program aimed at rooting out corruption in the Iraqi government.But of course. Rooting out corruption would set a dangerous precedent.

The Los Angeles Times has a good piece on the wholly ineffective 2,000-strong UN peacekeeping force that has been in southern Lebanon for a long while. Most notable, the peacekeepers currently have to worry about Hezbollah fighters who sidle up beside UN bases and fire off rockets towards Haifa and Nahariya in the hopes that Israel will retaliate and blow up some peacekeepers, as happened on Tuesday. But this part, explaining why the existing UN force never reined in Hezbollah in the first place, seems important:

The U.N. observers sat by while an unchecked Hezbollah consolidated political control over the south, built up its arsenal and girded itself to do battle once again with the nemesis across the border.

They had no choice, they say: Hezbollah could be tamed only with the use of force, which is not part of their mandate.

"You have to be able to impose international will," Pellegrini said. "You need heavy weapons and strong rules of engagement."

But this is the bind that will face any military that tries to tangle with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon: The organization will fight fiercely to keep its guns, and its widespread grass-roots popularity makes the militia capable of mounting a fierce insurgency.

The peacekeepers couldn't be here, U.N. officials acknowledge, if Hezbollah didn't tolerate them. And if they were cracking heads, they would no longer be tolerated.That seems believable. These days, everyone seems to be calling for a more effective international force to come in and stabilize southern Lebanon. But a "more effective" force that tried to tame Hezbollah could well mean war against the group's militiaand if the United States can't defeat an insurgency in Iraq, what makes anyone think that, say, European troops can pacify Hezbollah in southern Lebanon? Some sort of negotiated peace will likely be the only way forward, but that possibility seems quite distant at the moment.

This makes a lot of sense: "A decorated sergeant and Arabic language specialist was dismissed from the U.S. Army under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, though he says he never told his superiors he was gay and his accuser was never identified." Right, because the Army has way too many Arabic language specialists just sitting around. Oh, wait.

This isn't the first time either; a report in 2005 found that the Army has discharged 26 Arabic and Farsi linguists for being gay. Whether any of them actually had the privilege of facing their accusers is unclear.

Ezra Klein notes that Senate Republicans are now trying to put Democrats in a corner by putting forward a bill that would both raise the minimum wage and repeal the estate tax on multimillion dollar estates. That way, the thinking goes, Republicans can inoculate themselves against charges that they're opposed to raising the wage floor for low-income workers.

At any rate, it's a cheap gambit, and hopefully the Democrats will oppose it (repealing the estate tax would be, as we've pointed out before, disastrous for the poor, by putting programs such as Medicaid and Social Security under risk). But I also want to point out the paucity of the minimum-wage increase under discussion here. The current proposal would hike the minimum from $5.15 an hour, the level set in 1997, to $7.25 an hour by 2007.

That sounds like a big hike, but it's really not. As Dean Baker notes, due to inflation, $7.25 an hour in 2007 is equivalent to about $5.30 back in 1997. So this "hike" will really just ensure that the minimum wage goes back up to its inflation-adjusted 1997 level. It's not much of an increase, in real dollar terms, at all.

From the annals of media criticism. Greg Mitchell says that the U.S. media has been shamefully silent on the United States' deep involvement in the Israel-Lebanon war, its role as arms merchant to Israel, or the possible consequences of this alliance. "Fox News, for example, seems to be more concerned about Hezbollah agents sneaking over the Mexican or Canadian borders into the U.S."

Meanwhile, Sherry Ricchiardi of the American Journalism Reviewnotes that Afghanistan has now become "The Forgotten War" in the U.S. press, despite the fact that the Taliban is dangerously resurgent there and conditions are becoming worse and worse in the country. Few news organizations maintain a constant presence there anymore, with the exception of the New York Times and some of the wire services. One can only imagine that the same thing may inevitably happen to Iraq, as the media turns its short-attention span to the next war-of-the-hour and ignores everything else.

On a related noteand this isn't necessarily criticism of the press, although it could bePaul McLeary has an interesting post on how Hezbollah has been cultivating relationships with reporters as part of its broader media strategy. See also this piece about Israel's "cyber-soldiers," who are flooding chat rooms and online forums to counter anti-Israeli sentiment on the internet.

Over at Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies takes up the question of what war crimes Hezbollah and Israel might be committing in the current war. For Hezbollah's part, firing rockets into Israeli cities seems to be the chief war crime (unless, of course, one believes Hassan Nasrallah that they're being aimed at military targets); rightly or wrongly, it's unlikely that the group would ever be indicted for crimes of "aggression," and it's not always clear whether Hezbollah fighters are committing the crime of "sheltering" by mixing among civilians. In some places, they appear to be doing so, in others, it's more ambiguous.

On that point, I'd note Mitch Prothrero's report in Salon arguing that it is extremely unlikely that Hezbollah fighters are actually mixing in with civilians in Lebanonpartly because they fear they'll be betrayed by the general populationin which case Israel is certainly committing a war crime by bombing civilian neighborhoods without any clear military targets. Moreover, Human Rights Watch has condemned Israel's use of cluster bombs, which are "unacceptably inaccurate," in civilian areas. At this point, the legal questions hare are probably moot, since it seems that neither side will ever see a day in court, but it's still worth pointing out.

Update: See also the New York Times yesterday, in which Israel's Justice Minister, Haim Ramon, announced that "all those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are in some way related to Hezbollah." "In some way related"? Hezbollah, of course, is more than a militia, and employs some 250,000 Lebanese in various capacities, including schools, grocery stores, and orphanages.

Score one more for "compassionate" conservatism. 1-800-SUICIDE, a suicide-prevention hotline that over 2 million teenagers have called over the past three years, is now having its funding cut by the Bush administration. The hotline is being folded into the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Protection Agency (SAMHSA), a federal agency which "would have direct access to confidential data on individuals in crisis."

The problem, as Pam Spaulding points out, is that a lot of gay and lesbian youths use the suicide hotlineseeing as how they're two to three times more likely to attempt suicide than other young people. But the Bush administration and SAMHSA, for their part, have actively sought to dissuade research on suicide prevention among GLBT youths, going so far as to try to squelch a conference on the subject. SAMHSA has also suggested wholly ineffective "faith-based" methods for suicide prevention, backing down only after an outcry from mental health experts. So the fact that this agency, and this administration, will now run the hotline and collect data on the individuals who call is very upsetting. Here's a website with more information.

The big question in the Bush-Blair scenario-- announced Friday morning -- for setting up an international force to augment the Lebanese army along the Israel-Lebanon border is what countries would be involved. Recently Condi Rice had floated a scheme involving military units from Egypt and Turkey. The French, long involved with Lebanon, could provide members, even taking the lead. Chirac, in an interview in LeMonde yesterday, made it clear that any NATO presence in an international force would be widely viewed as an "armed wing of the West", and hence not acceptable. Putting US soldiers between the two combatants would risk a devastating political fallout at home. The very thought of a GI getting shot by Hezbollah, let alone by the Israelis, would plunge the already confused Bush government into a nightmare.

Anyhow, in typical Bush fashion, there is a loophole in the plan. "Prime Minister Blair and I believe that this approach gives the best hope to end the violence and create lasting peace and stability in Lebanon," Bush said this morning. Then the president added he was sending Rice, who previously put herself on record against a ceasefire, to the region with "instructions to work with Israel and Lebanon to come up with an acceptable U.N. Security Council resolution that we can table next week." The word "acceptable" gives the president plenty of wiggle room.